The findings also suggest solid practical implications. From a practical perspective,
the proliferation of data-sharing practices in the hotel industry suggests that the timely
data sharing-aggregation-dissemination mechanism required for implementing this
forecasting paradigm is feasible. Consider, for example, STR benchmarking service,
which includes collecting performance data (revenue, room rates and occupancy) from
over 30,000 hotels, processing the data and providing aggregated comparative reports
(the famous STAR report) back to the properties. Conceptually, this process, and
emerging online hotel data sharing services such as TravelClick®, is very similar to the
mechanism we suggest, as it also includes collecting data from individual properties,
processing the data and returning aggregated reports to the properties while
maintaining high level of confidentiality. While our proposed forecasting mechanism is
different in the type of data (forecast vs actual), timing, complexity of data-processing
algorithms and perhaps data granularity, overall the process is very similar in nature